Mom walks from New Orleans to Washington to highlight suffering a year after oil spill

WASHINGTON -- A month and a day after she left New Orleans on foot with a mission to meet President Barack Obama and describe to him the continued suffering of folks in the Gulf a year after the BP oil spill, Cherri Foytlin arrived at the White House on Thursday morning.

View full sizeJonathan Tilove, The Times-Picayune'All I'm asking for is 15 minutes and then I'll go home,' Cherri Foytlin said. She didn't get in to see the president.

"I really just want to be heard, and then I want to go back to my kids," said the 38-year-old mother of six and wife of an unemployed oil rig worker from Rayne, standing in front of the black iron White House fence, which is as close as you can get to the Oval Office without an invitation.

"So if anybody hearing my voice has a way to get me in with the president to help me protect my homeland, that's all I'm asking for is 15 minutes and then I'll go home."

Her plea fell on deaf ears, even as Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, co-chairmen of Obama's National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, passed on the pavement, with precisely the kind of access Foytlin walked more than a thousand miles to gain.

Foytlin and a gang of 10, including documentary filmmakers, made the trek.

"People have asked, 'Why walk? Why did you decide to do this?'" said Foytlin. "All that I can say is that this is more than just a personal journey to me, it's to bring the voice of the people up here because we're not being heard down there."

Her litany of grievances is a long one.

"We've got oil everywhere," said Foytlin, who said that even as oil continues to wash ashore, "they're taking down the cleanup work."

"Dead wildlife are coming in on a daily basis -- manatees, dolphins, pelicans, turtles, all the things that make the Gulf special," she said.

Jonathan Tilove, The Times-Picayune'I'm not going to be able to pay my mortgage when I get back,' Foytlin said.

Foytlin said she is among thousands of Gulf residents suffering negative health effects from the spill, effects she said the government has not adequately recognized or addressed.

She arrived in Washington on Thursday to see a front-page story in The Washington Post, headlined, "In Gulf Coast, streams of `spillionaires.'"

"Maybe some government officials got something, or the big businesses, or the cleanup contractors, but I'm not going to be able to pay my mortgage when I get back," Foytlin said.

She said the BP claims process is a bad joke, and that Kenneth Feinberg, the administrator of the Gulf Coast Claims Facility, ought to surrender his job to a well-qualified fisher who might better understand the situation.

A journalist, Foytlin found her voice as an activist in the midst of the crisis, appearing on CNN, speaking to the National Oil Spill Commission, and, in July, addressing the anti-moratorium Rally for Economic Survival at the Cajundome in Lafayette.

On this trip to Washington, however, she will be speaking at Power Shift 2011, a gathering of about 10,000 students whose declared mission is to "stand together to reclaim our democracy from big corporations and push our nation to move beyond dirty energy sources that are harming the health of people and the planet."

She also has meetings scheduled with folks at the EPA and the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

Call it the greening of Cherri Foytlin, who acknowledges that living and working in Louisiana can put you between a rock and hard place.

"Excuse the expression, but we're sucking at the tit of the oil companies, so that means we're in their pockets. So if a moratorium comes or if a spill happens, we're all at their beck and call, and we have to do what they want us to do," Foytlin said.

But Foytlin is trying to wean herself. While in D.C., she will be joining in a protest at BP's Washington office.